This morning we started with a lovely toast breakfast with Gwenno (our host) and then drove to St. Fagan’s Museum of Welsh Life to meet up with the Forward family (the family I stayed with 11 years ago). Jenny and Steve were there with their 6 (!) children: Isaac is now 17, then Josh, Jamie, Ethan, Leah, and Luke who is 4. Also there was Grand-dad (Steve’s dad who gave me tips on how to marry a Welshman last time I was here) and Steve’s sister and her husband (who told us: “Wales is God’s own country. It says so in the bible. ‘God created great whales.’ There's a spelling error but it's right there.”) and they brought one of Steve’s nephews (from a different sibling). We walked around St. Fagan’s for most of the day. There was apparently a Welsh museum strike because the workers used to get overtime on Saturdays and Sundays but they’re trying to take that away, so there was a strike today. Most of the museums were closed entirely. St. Fagans is an outdoor museum where they’ve taken historic buildings from all over Wales and put them all together in one big park. It was still open, but many of the buildings were closed. We did get to go into a couple of the houses and the blacksmith’s shop (he was hammering on some hot metal). It was lovely. Between Jenny and Steve’s sister, we had quite a picnic of fruit, sandwiches, pork pies, Scotch eggs, biscuits, crisps, and donuts.
Around 2pm we left St. Fagan’s and drove to Caerphilly. Caerphilly is honestly one of my favorite places ever. The giant castle and moat is right in the center of town. (We don't know what it's like to go to the grocery store or to Burger King and have a giant 11th century castle across the street.) It’s known for being one of the biggest castles in all of Europe, 2nd largest in UK, and having a leaning tower that’s leaning farther than the Leaning tower of Pisa. They’ve also added a cool dragon coming out of the ground in front of one of the gates. We didn’t pay to go in (it’s a ruins), but we walked around the entire thing. At this point, it was just Jenny and Steve and their kids. Then we went with them over to some old Caerphilly friends’ houses (Jenny and Steve live in Chorley now – where the Preston temple is – and poor Steve is Bishop again). The friends, Lee (now the bishop of Caerphilly ward) and Sarah I remembered from last time. They’d built a beautiful kit cabin out in their backyard as well as a mini football (soccer) green. So the kids played on the green and the adults played pool in the cabin and talked. We left their house around 7:30pm, got a recommendation for a good Indian place in Caerphilly (“You haven’t had a curry yet? Well then you’ll have to go there, haven’t you?”), and Tom and I were off to dinner.
At the Indian restaurant, the lady came over and asked “You want papadam?” We had no idea what that meant and the poor girl thought we couldn’t understand her accent, so she sent another guy over who said “Would you like Papadam?” Tom asked: “Is that a kind of bread?” His response was: “It’s Papadam.” We ordered two and realized we had had them before (they are like a big crisp shaped like a tortilla), but we had never known what they are called. It's what Indian restaurants serve before a meal the same way other restaurants serve bread. People here know their Indian food. And we clearly do not. The food was all quite delicious. We ate more than our fill and returned back to Gwenno’s around 10pm. Church in Caerphilly is at 9, so we best be off!
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